The Guy Who Goes On After the Ninja Act

First thing, let me tell you what a mess it is back here behind the curtain at Ecstatic Days. Ninja cowls everywhere. I wish I’d come in and gotten this thing started on Sunday, ’cause I could’ve opened some windows and let out the stale smoke-bomb fumes. The floor’s all sticky with last week’s zombies and the recliner reeks of Internecivus raptus. These things stuck to my shoe are either ivory beads or a spat-out teeth. Some pirate’s spent bandanna is draped over the halogen torch lamp over here. A dozen empty copper shell casings are lined up on top of the TV, unlike the two dozen or so lolling free on the floor. There’s a Colt single-action Army between the couch cushions, its cylinder loaded with six rounds of candy corn. That sound you hear is the Victrola; it’s been at the end of its record for days. There’s about a third left in that two-liter of orange soda, but it’s gone flat; the RC Cola’s just dregs and those Delerium Nocturnum bottles are all ashes and butts. One of them Predators smoked all the cigars Jeff said he was leaving for me. And I don’t know what that thing is in the sink, but given the local custom I’m going to go with: squid.

Honestly, that’s what I got right now. Introductions can wait for tomorrow. It’s like we got to the camp ground after dark. When the sun comes up we’ll see if we pitched our tents in the river.

I made a little list here of topics I thought might touch on this week, from self-promotion and the tradition of reviling one’s own writing, to why I’ve given up on writing roleplaying games (about one million times) and where the hell I get off thinking that I know better than Charles Stross what near-future SF is meant to do. And tomorrow I’m going to give you some zombies, because ’tis the season and the kids they seem to like the zombies.

In the meantime, to fill space, I may post pictures of nonsense things. Figure 1.1:

That picture is horrifying. Dunno who I’d least like to tangle with, both rooster-what-broke-his-manacles and diminutive-smoking-patent-leather-monk appear to be Bad Dudes. I imagine when they get really pissed they transform into some kind of spurred and smoldering chicken-child voltron.

Actually, the “kid” in the photo is 27. Smoking really does stunt your growth.

About Jeff VanderMeer

Photo by Kyle Cassidy

Jeff VanderMeer has been named the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence for Hobart-William Smith College. His most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) from FSG, which won the Shirley Jackson Award. The trilogy also prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau” and has been acquired by publishers in 28 other countries, with Paramount Pictures acquiring the movie rights. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, Vulture, Esquire.com, and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference, lectured at MIT, Brown, and the Library of Congress, and serves as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen writing camp . His forthcoming novel from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is titled Borne. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer. You can contact him at pressinfo at vandermeercreative.com. (Author photo by Kyle Cassidy.) More...